In his little pocket diary that he kept in Ramsdale as Charlotte's lodger Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) describes a dream ride around the lake:
Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers in my arms. A free man, I enjoy her among the ruins. Her surprise, my explanations, demonstrations, ullulations. Idle and idiotic fancies! A brave Humbert would have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, for instance, when she was again in my room to show me her drawings, school-artware); he might have bribed her – and got away with it. A simpler and more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to various commercial substitutes – if you know where to go, I don’t. Despite my manly looks, I am horribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought of running into some awful indecent unpleasantness. Those ribald sea monsters. ‘Mais allez-y, allez-y!’ Annabel skipping on one foot to get into her shorts, I seasick with rage, trying to screen her.
Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down a dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at dinner had benevolently proclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we would go to the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, erotically musing before trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder - and plunge with my nymphet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, and the Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet little orgy with a singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant Lolita behaving as reason knew she could not possibly behave. At 3 a. m. I swallowed a sleeping pill, and presently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody revealed to me, with a kind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet visited: it was glazed over with a sheet of emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vain to break it with a pickax, although imported mimosas and oleanders flowered on its gravelly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have paid me a sack of schillings for adding such a libidream to her files. Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big Haze and little Haze rode on horseback around the lake, and I rode too, dutifully bobbing up and down, bowlegs astraddle although there was no horse between them, only elastic air - one of those little omissions due to the absentmindedness of the dream agent. (1.11)
In Zhizn' Chernyshevskogo ("The Life of Chernyshevski"), Chapter Four of VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937), Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev quotes Chernyshevski's words “These gentlemen [who attempted to free Chernyshevski] didn’t even know that I can’t ride a horse:"
Надежды Чернышевского на литературные доходы не сбылись: эмигранты не только злоупотребляли его именем, но еще воровски печатали его произведения. И вовсе уже пагубными для него были попытки его освободить, попытки сами по себе смелые, но кажущиеся бессмысленными нам, видящим с изволока времени разность между образом "скованного великана" и тем настоящим Чернышевским, которого только бесили старания спасителей: "эти господа, говаривал он потом, -- даже не знали, что я и верхом ездить не умею". Вследствие этого внутреннего противоречия и получалась чушь (особый оттенок коей нам уже давно известен). Если верить молве, Ипполит Мышкин, под видом жандармского офицера явившийся в Вилюйск к исправнику с требованием о выдаче ему заключенного, испортил всё дело тем, что надел аксельбант на левое плечо вместо правого. До этого, а именно в 71 году, была уже попытка Лопатина, в которой все несуразно -- и то, как в Лондоне он вдруг бросил переводить "Капитал", чтобы Марксу, научившемуся читать по-русски, доставить "ден гроссен руссишен гелертен", и путешествие в Иркутск, под видом члена географического общества (при чем сибирские обыватели принимали его за ревизора инкогнито), и арест вследствие доноса из Швейцарии, и бегство, и поимка, и его письмо генерал-губернатору Восточной Сибири, в котором он с непонятной откровенностью рассказывал о своих планах. Всё это только ухудшало судьбу Чернышевского. Юридически поселение должно было начаться 10-го августа 70 года. Но только 2-го декабря его перевезли в другое место, в место, оказавшееся гораздо хуже каторги, -- в Вилюйск.
Chernyshevski’s hopes for literary profits were not realized: the émigrés not only misused his name but also pirated his works. And entirely fatal for him were the attempts made to free him, attempts which were in themselves courageous but which seem senseless to us, who can see from the hilltop of time the disparity between the image of a “fettered giant” and the real Chernyshevski whom these efforts by his would-be saviors only enraged: “These gentlemen,” he said later, “didn’t even know that I can’t ride a horse.” This inner contradiction resulted in nonsense (a particular shade of nonsense already long known to us). It is said that Ippolit Myshkin, disguised as a gendarme officer, went to Vilyuisk where he demanded of the district police chief that the prisoner be handed over to him, but spoiled the whole business by putting his shoulder knot on the left side instead of the right. Before this, namely in 1871, there was Lopatin’s attempt in which everything was absurd: the way he suddenly abandoned the Russian translation of Das Kapital that he was making in London, in order to get for Marx, who had learned to read Russian, “den grossen russischen Gelehrten”; his journey to Irkutsk in the guise of a member of the Geographical Society (with the Siberian residents taking him for a government inspector incognito); his arrest following a tip-off from Switzerland; his flight and capture; and his letter to the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia in which he told him all about his project with inexplicable frankness. All this only worsened Chernyshevski’s situation. Legally his settlement was supposed to begin on August 10, 1870. But only on December 2nd was he moved to another place, to a place which turned out to be far worse than penal servitude—to Vilyuisk.
According to Humbert Humbert, he writes Lolita in a New York jail. A radical critic and novelist, Nikolay Chernyshevski (1828-1889) wrote Chto delat'? ("What to Do?", 1863) imprisoned in the St. Petersburg's Peter-and-Paul Fortress. Humbert Humbert's dream bings to mind chetvyortyi son Very Pavlovny (the fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna), a literary vision of a future socialist utopia and the historical liberation of women in Chernyshevski's novel. Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (who is also mentioned by John Ray, Jr. in his foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript) and the psychoanalist and explorer Melanie Weiss (the author of the infolio de luxe Bagration Island, an item in Clare Quilty's collection of erotica) make one think of Belenki ("Mr. White") and Chernyshevski ("Mr. Black") paired in The Gift by the writer Shirin:
"Было время, -- сказал он шагая с Федором Константиновичем по аллее и машинально следуя ее лукаво ненавязчивому завороту; -- было время, когда в правление нашего Союза входили все люди высокопорядочные, вроде Подтягина, Лужина, Зиланова, но одни умерли, другие в Париже. Каким-то образом просочился Гурман, а затем постепенно втащил приятелей. Для этой тройки полная апатия добрейших, -- я ничего не говорю -- но совершенно инертных Керна и Горяинова (это же две глиняные глыбы!), только прикрытие, блиндаж. А натянутые отношения с Георгием Ивановичем являются залогом и его бездеятельности. Во всем этом виноваты мы, члены Союза. Если бы не наша лень, беспечность, неорганизованность, равнодушное отношение к Союзу, вопиющая неприспособленность к общественной работе, то никогда бы не случилось, что из года в год Гурман со товарищи выбирали себя самих или себе удобных. Пора положить этому конец. На ближайших выборах будет как всегда циркулировать их список... А мы тут пустим наш, стопроцентно-профессиональный: председатель Васильев, товарищ председателя
Гец, члены: Лишневский, Шахматов, Владимиров, вы и я, -- ну и ревизионную комиссию составим по-новому, тем более что Беленький и Чернышевский из нее выбыли".
"Нет уж, пожалуйста, -- сказал Федор Константинович (мельком полюбовавшись ширинским определением смерти), -- на меня не рассчитывайте. Ни в какие правления никогда в жизни не войду".
“There was a time,” he said, striding down a path in the park with Fyodor and automatically following its cunningly unobstrusive convolutions, “there was a time when all the people who went on the Committee of our Union were highly respectable, like Podtyagin, Ivan Luzhin, Zilanov, but some died and others are in Paris. Somehow Gurman oozed through into it and then gradually pulled his pals in. For this trio the passive participation of the extremely decent—I’m saying nothing—but completely inert Kern and Goryainov is a convenient cover, a kind of camouflage. And Gurman’s strained relations with Georgiy Ivanovich is a guarantee of inactivity on his part also. The ones to blame for all this are us, the members of the Union. If it were not for our idleness, carelessness, lack of organization, indifferent attitude to the Union and flagrant impracticality in social work it would never have happened that Gurman and his chums from year to year elected either themselves or else people congenial to them. It is time to put an end to this. Their list as always will be circulated at the coming elections… But we will then put out our own, one hundred percent professional: president—Vasiliev, vice-president—Getz, members of the board: Lishnevski, Shahmatov, Vladimirov, you and I—and then we’ll reconstitute the Inspection Committee, the more so since Belenki and Chernyshevski have dropped out.”
“Oh no, please,” said Fyodor (admiring in passing Shirin’s definition of death), “don’t count on me. I never went and never will go on any committee.” (Chapter Five)
In Volume Two of Gogol's Myortvye dushi ("Dead Souls") Chichikov famously tells General Betrishchev (Ulinka's father) the anecdote "Polyubi nas chyornen'kimi, a belen'kimi nas vsyakiy polyubit (Love us dirty, for any one will love us clean):"
-- У тебя, отец, добрейшая душа и редкое сердце, но ты поступаешь так, что иной подумает о тебе совсем другое. Ты будешь принимать человека, о котором сам знаешь, что он дурен, потому что он только краснобай и мастер перед тобой увиваться.
-- Душа моя! ведь мне ж не прогнать его,-- сказал генерал.
-- Зачем прогонять, зачем и любить?
-- А вот и нет, ваше превосходительство,-- сказал Чичиков Улиньке, с легким наклоном головы набок, с приятной улыбкой.-- По христианству именно таких мы должны любить.-- И тут же, обратясь к генералу, сказал с улыбкой, уже несколько плутоватой:-- Изволили ли, ваше превосходительство, слышать когда-нибудь о том, что такое: "Полюби нас черненькими, а беленькими нас всякий полюбит"?
- Нет, не слыхал.
-- А это преказусный анекдот,-- сказал Чичиков с плутоватой улыбкой.-- В имении, ваше превосходительство, у князя Гукзовского, которого, без сомнения, ваше превосходительство, изволите знать...
-- Не знаю.
-- Был управитель, ваше превосходительство, из немцев, молодой человек. По случаю поставки рекрут и прочего, имел он надобность приезжать в город и, разумеется, подмазывать суд. Впрочем, и они тоже полюбили, угощали. Вот как-то один раз у них на обеде говорит он: "Что ж, господа, когда-нибудь и ко мне! в именье к князю". Говорят: "Приедем!" Скоро после того случилось выехать суду на следствие, по делу, случившемуся во владениях графа Трехметьева, которого, ваше превосходительство, без сомнения, тоже изволите знать.
-- Не знаю.
-- Самого-то следствия они не делали, а всем судом заворотили на экономический двор, к старику, графскому эконому. Да три дни и три "очи без просыпу в карты. Самовар и пунш, разумеется, со стола не сходят. Старику-то они уж и надоели. Чтобы как-нибудь от них отделаться, он и говорит: "Вы бы, господа, заехали к княжому управителю немцу: он недалеко отсюда".-- "А, и в самом деле",-- говорят; и сполупьяна, небритые и заспанные, как были, на телеги да! к немцу... А немец, ваше превосходительство, надобно знать, в это время только что женился. Женился на институтке, молоденькой, субтильной (Чичиков выразил в лице своем субтильность). Сидят они двое за чаем, ни о чем не думая, вдруг отворяются двери -- и ввалилось сонмище.
-- Воображаю, хороши!-- сказал генерал.
-- Управитель так и оторопел, говорит: "Что вам угодно?" -- "А,-- говорят,-- так вот ты как!" И вдруг, с этим словом, перемена лиц и физиономии: "За делом. Сколько вина выкуривается по именью? Покажите книги!" Тот сюды-туды. "Эй, понятых!" Взяли, связали, да в город. Да полтора года и просидел немец в тюрьме.
-- Вот на! -- сказал генерал.
Улинька всплеснула руками.
-- Жена хлопотать! -- продолжал Чичиков.-- Ну, что ж может какая-нибудь неопытная молодая женщина. Спасибо, что случились добрые люди, которые посоветовали пойти на мировую. Отделался он двумя тысячами да угостительным обедом. И на обеде, когда все уже развеселились и он также, вот и говорят они ему: "Не стыдно ли тебе так поступить с нами? Ты всё бы хотел нас видеть прибранными, да выбритыми, да во фраках. Нет, ты полюби нас черненькими, а беленькими нас всякий полюбит.
Генерал расхохотался; болезненно застонала Улинька.
'He is mean and disgusting as well as empty-headed,' Ulinka put in hastily. 'Any one who could treat his brothers as he did and turn his own sister out of the house is a disgusting person.'
'But that is only talk.'
'People wouldn't talk for nothing. You are kindness itself, papa, and no one has such a heart, but sometimes you do things that might make any one believe the opposite. You will welcome a man though you know he is bad just because he has the gift of the gab and knows how to get round you.'
'My love, I could not kick him out,' said the general.
'No need to kick him out, but why like him?'
'Well, your Excellency,' said Chichikov to Ulinka, with a slight inclination of his head and an agreeable smile, 'as Christians it is just those we ought to love,' and then turning to the general, he said smiling, this time rather slily, 'Did you ever hear, your Excellency, of the saying—"Love us dirty, for any one will love us clean"?'
'have never heard it.'
'It is a very interesting anecdote,' said Chichikov, with a sly smile. 'On the estate, your Excellency, of Prince Gukzovsky, whom no doubt your Excellency knows …'
'I don't know him.'
'… There was a steward, your Excellency, a young man and a German. He had to go to the town about the levy of recruits and other business, and of course he had to grease the hands of the court officials. They liked him however and entertained him. So one day when he was at dinner with them, he said: "Well, gentlemen, I hope one day you will come and see me on the prince's estate." They said: "We'll come." It happened not long afterwards that the court had to conduct an examination on the estate of Count Trekhmetiev, whom no doubt your Excellency knows also.'
'I don't know him.'
'They didn't make the examination, but all the officials of the court betook them to the quarters of the count's steward, an old man, and for three days and three nights they played cards without stopping. The samovar and punch of course were on the table all the time. The old man got sick of them. To get rid of them he said to them: "You had better go and see the prince's German steward, gentlemen, he lives not far from here." "Oh, to be sure," they said, and half drunk, unshaven as they were and drowsy, they got into a cart and went off to the German's. … And the German, I must tell your Excellency, had only just got married; he had married a boarding-school miss, quite young and very genteel—(Chichikov expressed her gentility in his face). They were sitting at tea, the two of them, thinking of nothing at all, when the door opened, and the whole crew of them came reeling in.'
I can fancy—a nice set!' said the general laughing.
'The steward was so taken aback that he said: "What do you want?"
"Ah," said they, "so that's your line! "And with that they put on quite a different face and countenance. … "We have come on business! How much spirit is being distilled on the estate? Show us your books." The German did not know what to do. They called in witnesses. They bound his arms and took him away to the town, and for a year and a half he lay in prison.'
'Upon my soul!' said the general.
Ulinka clasped her hands.
'His wife did all she could,' Chichikov went on. 'But what can an inexperienced young woman do? Luckily some kind people turned up who advised her to settle it amicably. He got off for two thousand roubles and a dinner to the officials. And at dinner when they were all rather exhilarated, and he also, they said to him—"Aren't you ashamed now of the way you treated us? You wanted us shaven and well got up in our dress-coats: no, you love us dirty, for any one will love us clean."'
The general went off into a roar of laughter, Ulinka gave a moan of distress.
'I don't understand how you can laugh!' she said quickly. Her lovely brow was darkened by wrath. … 'It was a most disgraceful action for which they ought all to have been sent, I don't know where. …'
'My dear, I don't in the least justify them,' said the general, 'but what's to be done if it is funny? How did it go?" Love us clean …"?'
'Dirty, your Excellency,' Chichikov prompted him.
'"Love us dirty, for any one will love us clean." Ha, ha, ha, ha!' And the general's huge frame began quivering with laughter. His shoulders which had once worn fringed epaulettes shook as though they were still wearing fringed epaulettes. (Chapter II)
The author of Noch' pered Rozhdestvom ("The Christmas Eve," 1932), Gogol died in Moscow on February 21, 1852 (OS). According to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert Humbert (who had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) by forty days and died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” of “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore, “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. “Vivian Darkbloom” has written a biography, “My Cue,” to be publshed shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.
But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague in the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949, and everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, Humbert Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.). According to Humbert Humbert, after Lolita's escape he seldom if ever dreamed of her:
This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called “Dolorés Disparue,” there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life’s full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.
Singularly enough, I seldom if ever dreamed of Lolita as I remembered her - as I saw her constantly and obsessively in my conscious mind during my daymares and insomnias. More precisely: she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric--brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed. (2.25)
“Dolorés Disparue” hints at Albertine disparue (1925), the sixth volume of Marcel Proust’s seven part novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (“In Search of Lost Time”). According to Zina Mertz (in The Gift, Boris Ivanovich Schyogolev's stepdaughter), her late father resembled Proust's Swann:
Зина об этом рассказывала по другому. В ее передаче, облик ее отца перенимал что-то от прустовского Свана. Его женитьба на ее матери и последующая жизнь окрашивались в дымчато-романтический цвет. Судя по ее словам, судя также по его фотографиям, это был изящный, благородный, умный и мягкий человек, - даже на этих негибких петербургских снимках с золотой тисненой подписью по толстому кар тону, которые она показывала Федору Константиновичу ночью под фонарем, старомодная пышность светлого уса и высота воротничков ничем не портили тонкого лица с прямым смеющимся взглядом. Она рассказывала о его надушенном платке, о страсти его к рысакам и к музыке; о том, как в юности он однажды разгромил заезжего гроссмейстера, или о том, как читал наизусть Гомера: рассказывала, подбирая то, что могло бы затронуть воображение Федора, так как ей казалось, что он отзывается лениво и скучно на ее воспоминания об отце, т. е. на самое драгоценное, что у нее было показать. Он сам замечал в себе эту странную заторможенность отзывчивости. В Зине была черта, стеснявшая его: ее домашний быт развил в ней болезненно заостренную гордость, так что даже говоря с Федором Константиновичем она упоминала о своей породе с вызывающей выразительностью, словно подчеркивая, что не допускает (а тем самым всё-таки допускала), чтоб он относился к евреям, если не с неприязнью, в той или иной степени присущей большинству русских людей, то с зябкой усмешкой принудительного доброхотства. В начале она так натягивала эти струны, что ему, которому вообще было решительно наплевать на распределение людей по породам и на их взаимоотношения, становилось за нее чуть-чуть неловко, а с другой стороны, под влиянием ее горячей, настороженной гордыни, он начинал ощущать какой-то личный стыд, оттого что молча выслушивал мерзкий вздор Щеголева и то нарочито гортанное коверкание русской речи, которым тот с наслаждением занимался, - например, говоря мокрому гостю, наследившему на ковре: "ой, какой вы наследник!"
Zina told it quite differently. In her version the image of her father took on something of Proust’s Swann. His marriage to her mother and their subsequent life were tinted with a romantic haze. Judging by her words and judging also by the photographs of him, he had been a refined, noble, intelligent and kindly man—even in these stiff St. Petersburg cabinet pictures with a gold stamped signature on the thick cardboard, which she showed Fyodor at night under a streetlamp, the old-fashioned luxuriance of his blond mustache and the height of his collars did nothing to spoil his delicate features and direct, laughing gaze. She told him about his scented handkerchief, and his passion for trotting races and music, and that time in his youth when he had routed a visiting grand master of chess, and the way he recited Homer by heart: in talking of him she selected things that might touch Fyodor’s imagination, since it seemed to her she detected something sluggish and bored in his reaction to her reminiscences of her father, that is to the most precious thing she had to show him. He himself noticed this strangely delayed responsiveness of his. Zina had one quality which embarrassed him: her home life had developed in her a morbidly acute pride, so that even when talking to Fyodor she referred to her race with challenging emphasis, as if stressing the fact that she took for granted (a fact which its stressing denied) that he regarded Jews, not only without the hostility present to a greater or lesser degree in the majority of Russians, but did so without the chilly smile of forced goodwill. In the beginning she drew these strings so taut that he, who in general did not give a damn about the classification of people according to race, or racial interrelations, began to feel a bit awkward for her, and on the other hand, under the influence of her burning, watchful pride, he became aware of a kind of personal shame for listening silently to Shchyogolev’s loathesome rot and to his trick of garbling Russian, in imitation of a farcical Jewish accent as when he said, for instance, to a wet guest who had left traces on the carpet: “Oy, vat a mudnik!” (Chapter Three)